1st Edition

Medieval Music

Edited By Honey Meconi Copyright 2011
    560 Pages
    by Routledge

    Almost a thousand years of music are treated in this volume on the performance practice of the Middle Ages, covering monophony and polyphony, sacred and secular, genre and theory. The essays selected deal with the most crucial of performers' decisions: pitch, rhythm, and performing forces, as well as related matters such as proportions, tunings, and the need for ornamentation. The introduction provides an overview of the major issues and resources, situating medieval music within the context of the early music revival and the debate on authenticity and providing an extended bibliography of relevant scholarship.

    Contents: Introduction; Part I Plainchant: The performance of plainchant: some preliminary observations of the new era, Lance W. Brunner; Giving voice to Gregorian chant or: coping with modern orthodoxies, Katarina Livljanic. Part II Secular Monophony: Rhythm, meter, and melodic organization in medieval songs, Hans Tischler; The 'not-so-precisely measured' music of the Middle Ages, Hendrik van der Werf; Voices and instruments in medieval French secular music: on the use of literary texts as evidence for performance practice, Sylvia Huot; Johannes de Grocheio on secular music: a corrected text and a new translation, Christopher Page. Part III Polyphony to 1300: The performance of Parisian organum, Edward Roesner; Franco of Cologne on the rhythm of organum purum, Charles M. Atkinson; The Copula according to Johannes de Garlandia, Jeremy Yudkin; Conductus and modal rhythm, Ernest H. Sanders; The performance of ars antiqua motets, Christopher Page. Part IV Mass and Motet after 1300: Representations of the Mass in medieval and Renaissance art, James W. McKinnon; The performing ensemble for English church polyphony, c.1320-c.1390, Roger Bowers; Text underlay in early 15th-century musical manuscripts, Gilbert Reaney. Part V The Polyphonic Chanson: Machaut's 'pupil' Deschamps on the performance of music: voices or instruments in the 14th-century chanson, Christopher Page; The performance of songs in late medieval France: a new source, Christopher Page; Texting in 15th-century French chansons: a look ahead from the 14th century, Lawrence Earp; Embellishment and urtext in the 15th-century song repertories, David Fallows. Part VI Other Matters: Musica recta and musica ficta, Margaret Bent; The origin and early history of proportion signs, Anna Maria Busse Berger; Jerome of Moravia on the Rubeba and Viella, Christopher Page; The 'Arabian influence' thesis revisited, Shai Burstyn; Series bibliography; Name index.

    Biography

    Honey Meconi is Professor of Music in the College Music Department and Professor of Musicology in the Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester, NY. She is an expert on Renaissance music as well as on the music of Hildegard of Bingen. Her books include Pierre de la Rue and Musical Life at the Habsburg-Burgundian Court (Oxford University Press, 2003), Early Musical Borrowing (Routledge, 2004) and Fortuna desperata: 36 Settings of an Italian Song (A-R Editions, 2001; reprint edition with revisions, in press).